“When Apple Computer hired Sebastian Gunningham away from Oracle in the spring of 2002, some analysts thought CEO Steve Jobs had brought him onboard to crack the corporate-computing market — long a dream of Apple execs. Sure enough, a month later, at Apple’s 2002 World Wide Developers Forum, Jobs & Co. launched the Xserve, a powerful server aimed squarely at luring corporations and other users of big hardware,” Alex Salkever writes for BusinessWeek.
“Shortly thereafter, Apple began to build a sales team to plumb the corporate market. It seemed primed for battle with the likes of hardware giants Dell, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems,” Salkever writes. “Two years have gone by, though, and Apple has yet to make serious inroads into the corporate market. Worse, its efforts took a huge hit when Gunningham quit in January to become the CEO of a small Miami-based software outfit. Apple says it remains committed to enterprise computing and is actively seeking a replacement for Gunningham.”
Salkever writes, “Apple’s sales efforts in business computing are still relatively young — it’s not uncommon for businesses seeking to crack corporate computing to take five years or more before making real inroads. In fact, sales of Apple’s servers are growing smartly off a tiny base. Still, Apple could improve its chances by making the purchase of an Xserve more palatable to potential customers. Ultimately, Apple needs to think about expanding into different business segments if it wants real staying power in corporate-computing markets. That will require much heavier lifting to convince IT managers outside Apple’s fan base, since many remain wary of a company with so little history and reputation in corporate computing.”
Salkever writes, “Apple needs a visible sales boss to energize the troops and close bigger deals. It needs to offer better guarantees to potential customers. And it needs to give corporate IT departments a reason to believe that the Mac folks know big business just like the Dell people, HP people, or IBM people. That’s a sizeable cultural shift, but a necessary one if Apple hopes to play in the competitive corporate-computing market. Now is the time to move.”
Full article here.
Nobody makes a good point. It is better to do it slowly and well than quickly and badly if you are Apple. Many people are locked in Windows and they have to KNOW it is going to work before they switch, retrain, hire new tech staff etc. Small business is easier. Things like the VT supercluster help too – it is serious and powerful, useful to some corporates, and unavailable at dell.com.
Oh and the iPods do help. I’m switching after getting one. So there!
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It will be hard to get Apple into the corporate sector. I work for a city government and fortunately our I.T. director is forward thinking. He’s pushing Open Source which I’m glad for since its my background. We’re testing thin client right now in hopes of replacing our Windows PC’s down the road. Macs are wonderful but I couldn’t recommend them at our work especially when we can use thin clients running X Windows, Open Office, X3270 for mainframe access, Firefox browser, and Thunderbird Email. This provides for the needs of 95% of our employees. And these thin client machines (http://www.idotpc.com) cost about $250 without the monitor. Now if we weren’t looking at thin client, I would recommend Macs over Windows PC’s.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Macs. I recommend them to everyone at work for home. I bring my iBook to work everyday. And I recommend PowerBooks for our laptops all the time. Diversity is the key. By the end of this year, I’ll be running a dual G5 PowerMac, an AMD 1.4ghz running Debian Linux which will be used as my X server and mail server, an idotpc running as a thin client, and my iBook at home.
I wish I could disagree with Jeff, but I have to agree. Apple in corporate or any large organization does not make sense. Corporation will not gain any significant advantage from switching. They will be just replacing the company holding a leash over their IT equipment.
One thing I would change in his open-source computing environment is, I would use both linux and freebsd. The skills required to maintain these OS are similar enough, most sysadmins will able maintain both OS, but code base is different enough, there is very small chance of one virus/worm attacking both OS. Both OS are also multi-platform, so mixing x86, ppc and sparc can further reduce the impact of common mode faiilure. And if you are really paranoid, use an unpopular propritary OS for the servers. Xserve would be a good choice
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